An Attribute-Based Distributed Data Sharing Scheme

Patients rely on their public health records shared among medical institutions to receive the appropriate treatment they require. They must completely trust that these institutions will secure their records, protect their privacy, and efficiently share them when requested by other institutions. Unfortunately, medical institutions cannot fully be trusted for several reasons. First, patient records are stored on the servers of the medical institutions which could result in security issues and also a single point of failure. Second, centralized storage may also result in privacy concerns if records are incorrectly shared or leaked. Third, institutions may purposely delay sharing patient records for competitive reasons. To address these issues, we propose an attribute-based distributed data sharing scheme for patients to control how their records are shared. The distributed file sharing can effectively prevent the single point of failure and ensure data availability upon its request. Moreover, patients are also given the capability of selectively sharing their records for privacy protection. Our analysis shows that while ensuring attribute-based sharing of medical records, the proposed scheme can also work with the peer-to-peer distributed network storage such as InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to improve efficient data retrieval.